Chapter 39

It was a good thing he didn’t need eight hours of sleep anymore. When he finally got back to sleep, he only had about two hours until sunrise. Minou and his family were all early risers, even with the night’s excitement. Not for the first time early in the morning, Luke cursed his perception stat.

He got himself dressed and stuffed the rags that had been his old clothes into the leather backpack he’d made. His new pants and shirt weren’t nearly as comfortable, but they were considerably cleaner and they blended in. Other than the obvious difference in skin tone, Luke thought he’d blend right in.

Minou sent Luke off with a lot of food and an actual waterskin, which he was grateful for. The plastic bottles he’d been using were considerably worse for the wear, all two that were still left. Luke thanked them and, when they weren’t looking, left a gold coin on the counter. Then he set off for the village and from there to find the road heading east.

He moved at a jog, or at least what he considered to be one now. He was holding a pace of he guessed better than twenty miles an hour without even trying, and that was on a winding dirt track full of ruts and dips. If he pushed himself, he was betting he could run twice as fast for at least five or ten minutes.

Every two hours or so, he’d come across another town. For the most part, they were simple things that looked a lot like the first town he’d visited. Luke slowed down a walk when he got near and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible, though he was foiled by his high XP total. Even with [Disguise]and [Stealth] helping to mitigate it, at least as much as Stealth could help in the middle of the day on an open road, people noticed his presence when he walked by.

He got a few strange looks, but more than one person made a sign with their hand that it took him a few repetitions to recognize as some sort of gesture of respect, or maybe a salute. It kind of reminded him of those people back home who were all about thanking people for their service. Lizzie had a friend who had been part of the army, said it always made him uncomfortable because his job had taken him nowhere near the frontlines ever.

That’s what it was like. He didn’t know these people. He wasn’t fighting for them, and he had no idea why they kept looking at him like that, calling him Guardian, and thanking him. He’d thought it was the armor he’d stolen at first, but he’d been extra careful to make sure it wasn’t visible at all and he still caught people doing it.

After the third town, Luke started circling off the roads rather than walk through them. It actually took him about the same amount of time to go wide through fields and trees as it did to walk down the street, and it was distinctly less conspicuous. Very few monsters or animals even stopped to look at him when he went by. Most of them either froze or ran at his passing, and he never encountered anything that he would place above level 15.

He was about 650 XP short of his next level, and he was 1 AP short of bumping up his [Disguise]skill another rank. He wanted every advantage he could get before he actually walked into Valtira, so he detoured away from the road and started looking for monsters. He wasn’t looking for anything as challenging as the chimera, just three or four weaker monsters he could steamroll to get his next infusion of AP and buff some skill ranks.

That hunt took far longer than he’d expected, and made Luke reconsider just how dangerous the rest of the world was based on his limited experience in Tenebrous Valley. Things were more spread out on the other side of the pass, and with that space there was a lot less pressure forcing things to level up. His hunt took him miles and miles from the road.

He eventually found a pair of level 14 bears, both of which put the chimera to shame in terms of sheer size, but had nothing on it when it came to speed. They attacked on sight too, which Luke appreciated. He didn’t feel guilty about killing a pair of man-eaters, even if he was the one who’d intruded on their territory.

A part of him wanted to stop and build new hide tanning racks, to butcher the bears as best he was able and make something useful out of the hides. He reminded himself that he was no longer trapped far from civilization and didn’t need to do that kind of stuff anymore. He just needed the XP.

Reluctantly, he moved on. The mountains he’d come out of had followed him, always to the south, curving around the land and blocking out the horizon. By his logic, he’d come from the mountains, the chimera had come from the mountains, Red had come from the mountains. If he went that way, that’s where things got stronger. He hoped he didn’t need to go too far to get the last few kills he needed.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, he could safely say he no longer needed to go searching for monsters. He ducked behind a tree just as a large rock, really more of a small boulder, went flying by. It hit the next tree down the line, broke off a handful of branches, and crashed into the trunk hard enough that Luke could actually see the whole tree tilt a few degrees.

“Nope, nope nope nopenopenope. Fuck all of this,” Luke said. The ogre roared in response and started stamping down the slope towards his position. Each step shook the ground. Luke scrambled away from the monster, weaving through trees and hoping that the next rock to come flying down his way didn’t catch him by surprise. There was only so much [Peripheral Awareness]and [Twitch Reflexes] could do against a boulder half the size of his body that he wouldn’t see until it crashed through the branches and hit him.

The monster was maybe level fifteen or sixteen. He probably could have killed it without too much trouble, despite its overwhelming strength. Or maybe it was some sort of rock throwing skill that made them faster. Luke wasn’t sure, but either way, he could have worked around that.

A second and then third miniature boulder crashed through the foliage nearby, lobbed by the ogre’s two buddies. All three of them crashed down the mountainside in pursuit, their enraged bellowing clearly marking their positions. If they’d just spread a bit farther apart, he thought he could isolate one long enough to bring it down.

They didn’t do that, unfortunately. In fact, the noise seemed to draw them to each other, and Luke was left with no other choice but to keep running to stay ahead of them. While he ran, he schemed. The ogres were strong, but they didn’t seem that smart. It was a dumb plan to just pit his raw power against theirs, to play to their strengths.

There was a small ravine he’d noted on his way up that he steered the chase to. It was maybe fifteen feet across, easily jumpable as long as he wasn’t blundering wildly through the trees. Luke crossed it without a problem and made sure to make plenty of noise so that the ogres would pursue. With any luck, they’d burst right out of the trees at full speed, cross the three or four feet of open space next to the ravine, and tumble head first right into it.

He wasn’t going to stick around to find out. If all three of them did manage to jump the ravine, or even just two of them, he didn’t want to be anywhere near where they landed. If he split them up, well, it would depend on the split. He didn’t see a lot of point in planning out his next twelve moves when it all depended on whether or not this part worked.

He heard a surprised yell echo through the trees, followed by a massive thump and the crack of rocks breaking. Luke grinned and listened for the sounds of the other ones falling. A few seconds later, he heard the massive crash of one of them landing, presumably having jumped the ravine. There was no third crash, which Luke assumed meant the last one had stopped in time and wasn’t keen on trying to jump it.

With the pack thoroughly separated, he doubled back to see if he could close in on the one ogre who’d stuck the landing and ambush it. [Stealth]helped a little here, though it seemed to want him to take a route that was both convoluted and significantly longer than necessary. He couldn’t really figure out why it pushed him to go that way at first, but as soon as he narrowed down his thought process from ‘not being seen’ to ‘not being seen by the ogre,’ everything straightened itself out.

Luke filed that trick away to be examined later for possible exploitation. The skill was trying to help him avoid being seen by everything, or maybe just everything his perception had fed him but that he hadn’t had the time to consciously sort out. Either way, he wanted to know a bit more about how the skill worked to see if he could use it to detect things as well.

That was a problem for another time. Luke ghosted through the woods as quietly as he could until he found the ogre, which wasn’t hard. Unlike him, it made no effort to conceal its presence, and no effort to wait for the other two to catch up. It stomped through the trees, shoving whole trunks aside and tearing up roots where it needed to.

It definitely had a higher strength on top of being at least eleven feet tall with proportionate arms. Getting a solid hit in on a vulnerable area was going to be a challenge if Luke fought fair. So he instead did his best to guess which trees the ogre would pass by, scrambled up one, and waited. A minute later, the ogre pushed a nearby tree out of its way, and Luke tensed to make the jump.

His guess was off slightly; it took a path between two trees to the left, but Luke could still make that jump. His big problem was going to be that he wouldn’t get that nice clean swing at the back of its head he was going for, and if it had anything like his own [Peripheral Awareness], there was every chance that it would see him in the air. He did not want to get caught mid-jump, unable to dodge.

On the bright side, his agility was definitely higher than the ogre’s. It passed by, stepping into what Luke judged to be the perfect position, and he leaped off the tree. The branch he’d been squatting on shattered from the force, but he was already in the air. The ogre started to turn, its eyes wide in surprise, when Luke brought his mace down on its skull with all his might.

It was like bashing a mountain. The steel groaned and deformed, its formerly straight haft now twisted out at an angle. Reverberations stronger than Luke had ever felt went through his hands and up his arms, so intense that he almost dropped the weapon in both pain and surprise. Then he crashed into the ogre’s chest and they both went down.

Fortunately, Luke landed on top and the ogre didn’t make a move to grab him. It lay there on the ground in a heap, its limbs twitching and eyes rolled up into the back of its head. Luke stared at it a moment, then looked to his mace. There… probably wasn’t any way of fixing that. He tried to bend it back straight, and he mostly succeeded, but it was still very obviously damaged.

“Ah, damn it,” he said. Then he stalked over to the ogre and slammed the mace down onto its face a few times. It started to bend again. Luke cursed his luck and delivered one final blow, finishing off both the mace and the ogre at the same time.

[You have slain Black Pine Hill Giant (lvl 17). 298 XP awarded.]
[ Congratulations! You have reached level 21. 21 AP awarded for use.]

“Giant? Shouldn’t you be like twice as tall then?”

He regarded the broken mace and sighed. At least he’d gotten the level he needed to increase the ranks on a few skills.